The Incredible Years

Product Information

Clinical issues such as promoting attendance, managing resistant parents or teachers, being culturally responsive, managing disruptive children, setting up practice role plays, tailoring programs for children with developmental issues, and getting accredited or certified in the program. Webster-Stratton, C. (2015). The Incredible Years® parent programs: Methods and principles that support program fidelity. In J. J. Ponzetti & J. J. Ponzetti (Eds.), Evidence-based parenting education: A global perspective (pp. 143–160). New York: Routledge/Taylor & Francis. The Incredible Years Programme enables parents to have effective tools in managing their child’s behaviour. It aims to give you new strategies as well as building on the ones you are already using to make them more effective in your home. In turn you should see an increase in positive behaviours and a reduction in behaviours your find challenging, helping you feel more confident and reducing household stress. The Basic Parent Training Program is 14 weeks for prevention populations, and 18 - 20 weeks for treatment. The Child Training Program is 18-22 weeks. For treatment version, the Advance Parent Program is recommended as a supplemental program. Basic plus Advance takes 26-30 weeks. The Child Prevention Program is 20 to 30 weeks and may be spaced over two years. The Teachers Program is 5 to 6 full-day workshops spaced over 6 to 8 months. Delivery Settings

The Incredible Years Child Training Program (Dina Dinosaur Social Skills and Problem-Solving Curriculum) - The Child Training program promotes social competency and reduces conduct problems. Children are trained in four areas: Deković, M., Asscher, J. J., Hermanns, J., Reitz, E., Prinzie, P., & Van Den Akker, A. L. (2010). Tracing changes in families who participated in the home-start parenting program: Parental sense of competence as mechanism of change. Prevention Science, 11(3), 263–274. We conducted a longer-term follow-up of the effects of Incredible Years for reducing conduct problems in a prevention setting with children who scored at or above the 75th percentile on the Eyberg Child Behavior Inventory (ORCHIDS; Chhangur et al. 2012). Immediately after the intervention and 4 months later, families showed reduced parent-reported, but not observed, conduct problems, parallel with improvements in parent-reported and observed parenting practices (Weeland et al. 2017; Weeland et al. 2018a). In this paper, we present the effects of Incredible Years on children’s broader mental health 2.5-year post-intervention. Are there Sustained Effects on Conduct Problems? No broader benefits of Incredible Years are found according to parents, teachers, and children: Incredible Years did not reduce children’s peer problems, emotional problems, and hyperactivity 2.5 years after the end of the intervention (Table 1). Similarly, children of parents who participated in Incredible Years did not outperform children in the control condition on the neuropsychological tasks measuring attention and behavior inhibition. Finally, families who participated in Incredible Years did not make less use of services (i.e., special education or post-intervention mental healthcare related to children’s mental health or parenting difficulties) in the years after intervention. Post-hoc Analyses

CAPS deliver the Incredible Years programme for 14 weeks to parents of children aged two to four, or for 10 weeks for parents of children aged up to two.

The preliminary effect of a parenting program for Korean American mothers: A randomized controlled experimental study. International Journal of Nursing Studies, 45, 1261-1273. We found significant effects of Incredible Years on parent-reported reduced conduct problems that sustained until the 2.5-year follow-up. The effect size was meaningful, but relatively small, and lower than typically found in indicated prevention trials for children’s conduct problems ( d = 0.31 as opposed to d = 0.55 in Leijten et al. ( 2019)). Apart from the fact that we examined longer-term, and not direct, effects, this could be related to a relatively low threshold (75th percentile) for family inclusion, which led to the inclusion of families with a wide variety of problem severity ranging from mild to severe. It could also be due to the selective attrition that occurred in our intervention group—families with children with more severe conduct problems were more likely to drop out. Twenty percent of families in the intervention condition did not receive the Incredible Years intervention but were included in the intent-to-treat analyses. A previous analysis showed that families allocated to Incredible Years, but who did not take part in the group meetings, did not significantly improve in disruptive behavior compared to control families (Van Aar et al. 2019). Our intention-to-treat analyses therefore probably yielded conservative effect estimates. Sustained Effects of Incredible Years on Conduct Problems Hsueh, J., Lowenstein, A. E., Morris, P., Mattera, S. K., & Bangser, M. (2014). Impacts of social-emotional curricula on three-year-olds: Exploratory findings from the Head Start Cares Demonstration. OPRE Report, 78 - This reference refers to a randomised control trial, conducted in the USA. The program representative did not provide information about a Logic Model for The Incredible Years (IY).

About This Program

This summary comes from the original systematic review: Gardner, F., Leijten, P., Mann, J., Landau, S., Harris, V., Beecham, J., ... & Scott, S. (2017). Could scale-up of parenting programmes improve child disruptive behaviour and reduce social inequalities? Using individual participant data meta-analysis to establish for whom programmes are effective and cost-effective. Public Health Research, 5(10) Five- to six-year outcome and its prediction for children with ODD/CD treated with parent training. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 51(5), 559–566. Between September 2017 and August 2018, CAPS delivered 75 Incredible Years parenting courses to 989 parents of children aged under four. Reinke, W. N., Herman, K. C., & Dong, N. (2016). The Incredible Years Teacher Classroom Management program: Outcomes from a group randomized trial. Unpublished Manuscript. Retrieved from ( http://incredibleyears.com/wp-content/uploads/Reinke-IY-TCM-Program-Outcomes.pdf). The high strength of evidence rating for this meta-analysis is based on having a large overall sample size and inclusion of only Randomised Controlled Trials (RCTs).

During every session, discussions include how teachers can involve parents in promoting positive behaviours at home and developing a strong parent-teacher partnership to strengthen academic outcomes as well as social and emotional competence. Parents are included in behaviour plans. The 3rd edition has many new features. It is formatted for easier reading, with pull-out sections highlighting key principles and parenting tools. It includes pictures from the video program chosen to remind parents of the vignette discussions they had in their groups. There are also detailed scripts that include social, emotion, academic and persistence coaching dialogues for parents to model, prompt, describe, expand and praise. Scripts are also included to support parents use of puppets and pretend play designed to enhance their children’s learning, modeling and practice of appropriate social and emotion behaviors, thoughts and feelings. All of these approaches will enhance parent-child positive relationships and attachment, build language development and promote positive peer interactions. Webster-Stratton, C., & Reid, J. (2010). Adapting the Incredible Years, an evidence-based parenting programme, for families involved in the child welfare system. Journal of Children’s Services, 5, 25–42. https://doi.org/10.5042/jcs.2010.0115. The only longer-term randomized controlled trial of Incredible Years (> 1 year, including follow-up data of control group) included assessments 5 to 10-year post-intervention (Scott et al. 2014). Results suggested sustained improvements in conduct problems for children in a clinical setting, but not for children in a prevention setting. This might in part be because effect sizes tend to be smaller in prevention settings (Leijten et al. 2018). To be able to detect smaller effect sizes, larger sample sizes are needed. The sample size of 109 families in the prevention trial by Scott et al. ( 2014) may have been too small to detect such smaller prevention effects. Other follow-up studies have been reported, but due to waitlist control designs, follow-up data for control groups were not available. We conducted a longer-term (albeit shorter than Scott and colleagues) follow-up including the control group in a large randomized controlled trial ( N = 387), to ensure sufficient power to detect smaller effects on children’s conduct problems. Are there Broader Benefits of Incredible Years on Children’s Development? The sustained effects of Incredible Years pertained to parent-reported conduct problems specifically; no effects were found using children’s self-reports or teacher reports. This may indicate that children’s conduct problems have changed in interaction with their parents specifically, and not in the school setting that is part of child and teacher report (De Los Reyes et al. 2009). An alternative explanation is that Incredible Years changed parents’ perception of their child’s behavior. A better understanding of their child’s behavior could, for example, lead to parents having more realistic, age-appropriate expectations, and reduced stress, relieving their potentially initial overestimation of their child’s behavior problems (Crnic et al. 2005; Moens et al. 2018). Yet another explanation might be that the questionnaire used by parents (i.e., the ECBI), detected changes in conduct problems that the questionnaire used by teachers and children (i.e., the SDQ), was unable to detect. Although well-established and validated (Bourdon et al. 2005; Stone et al. 2010), the SDQ conduct scale consists of only five items and has only three response options (i.e., not true, somewhat true, and certainly true). This makes the SDQ suitable for screening purposes but perhaps less suitable for assessing children’s behavior changes in the context of a parenting intervention. Moreover, given that the SDQ conduct problems scale also had a lower reliability, the power to detect the already subtle changes was further reduced. No Broader Benefits of Incredible Years on Children’s Development

EIF Programme Assessment

Schools and early learning services can choose to use PB4L resources to assist them with encouraging positive behaviour from their children and young people. The PB4L initiatives This study was conducted in Wales, with a sample of 170 children between 3 and 7 years, recruited on the basis of SDQ scores. Measures

On the one hand, the parent-perceived effects of parenting interventions such as Incredible Years may sustain. If children’s conduct problems reduce when parents participate in Incredible Years, this will probably reinforce parents’ more positive strategies, reducing conduct problems further. Related to this, when parents see that their parenting strategies reduce children’s conduct problems, feelings of parental competence and satisfaction may increase (Levac et al. 2008). In turn, this may help them keep using these strategies, also in the face of new challenges (Bandura 1977; Mouton and Roskam 2015; Deković et al. 2010). Families who displayed greater levels of distress and higher levels of problems, particularly higher child disruptive behaviour or parental depression found greater positive effect, with more improvement from this intervention. The role of mental health factors and program engagement in the effectiveness of a preventive parenting program for Head Start mothers. Child Development, 74(5), 1433-1453.

Child outcomes

Regarding intervention participation, we examined parents’ attendance. This was important, as previous research has found significant associations between attendance and parenting intervention effectiveness (e.g., Kazdin and Wassell 1998; Prinz and Miller 1994). To boost parents’ attendance, childcare was arranged for parents who attended intervention sessions during office hours. Parents were compensated for travel costs when needed. Of the families randomized to the intervention, 44 did not attend any session. The other parents—the parents who attended at least one session—attended on average 11.01 (SD = 3.69) out of 15 sessions (with 74% attending at least 10 sessions). Families in the control condition did not receive Incredible Years but, if needed, were provided with information about professional healthcare. A previous analysis (Weeland et al. 2017) demonstrated that intervention dosage (i.e., how many sessions parents attended) did not moderate the Incredible Years intervention effect on child behavior outcomes. Measures At 2.5-year follow-up, we asked participants: “Did you receive professional help between this assessment and the previous one?” Parents answered this question with yes or no. In case parents answered “yes,” the follow-up question was “What kind of professional help did you receive?”. Parents could then mark a number of alternatives: (a) professional family help at home, (b) ambulatory professional help for your child at a mental health institute/child psychiatry institute/community health service institute/private practice (pedagogical or psychological help)/or parenting support institute, (c) institutionalized care for the child, or (d) other, such as financial help or individual therapy for the parents. In the present study, we dichotomized information across answer categories. The score on this service use variable thus represents the proportion of parents that had received some form of parenting-related or child mental health-related professional service. About half of the families in the intervention (51%) and control condition (53%) had received additional services. Analyses The programme has now been implemented in over 20 countries around the world. These include Canada, England, Wales, Scotland, Norway, Palestine, New Zealand, Ireland, Portugal, Australia, Denmark, The Netherlands, Russia, Finland, Sweden. This training will prepare group leaders to lead three different basic parenting programs: (1) Toddler Parenting Program (ages 1-3 years) which is 13 weekly sessions; (2) Preschool Parenting Program (ages 3-6 years) which is 18-20 sessions; and (3) School-Age Parenting Program (ages 6-8 years) which is 16 sessions (four additional sessions for the Supporting your Child’s Education component).